


The Mornings Afterward

by chickpea12



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Crowley Created the Stars (Good Omens), Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley being patient with Aziraphale, First Time, Going on walks in the evening, Love, M/M, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens), Vulnerability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 07:02:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21797992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chickpea12/pseuds/chickpea12
Summary: Aziraphale knew how humans whispered to each other - don’t let the sun go down on you there, they’d say of an unfamiliar town, it’s dangerous. You never know what might happen. But it went the other way, too. For him. Be careful where you are when the sun rises. Be careful what someone else might see.Aziraphale is not scared of the dark nearly as much as he is scared of love, and the dark makes a lovely place to hide.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 126





	The Mornings Afterward

Principality Aziraphale, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, is undeniably an angel. And being an angel, he knows a thing or two about love. And two things he knows, with absolute certainty, is that a) he is terrified of being in love, and b) if he must be in love, the best, safest time to do it is nighttime. Aziraphale is not scared of the dark nearly as much as he is scared of love, and the dark makes a lovely place to hide. So after 6,000 years, when the world doesn’t end and Aziraphale can look at Crowley, really look at him, without watching over their shoulders at the same time, he is driven nearly to his knees. He loves Crowley so much it hurts. He can feel it like an ache. It sits in his soul, the silhouette of love; a smooth stone, warm from having come from deep in the earth. It is the beginning of a long journey.

\-----

The first time he and Crowley make love is lovely. They stay curled into each other through the night, and Aziraphale doesn’t know if he sleeps and it doesn’t matter. To be in the bed with him is so safe. To hold him and keep him warm. To kiss the nape of his neck. To press his lover against his chest, reverent in sleep. Aziraphale has never known moments like these, dropping softly into his soul. This must be what the earth felt like, he thinks, the first time it ever rained. I have never been alive like this before.

It is an instinct 6000 years in the making when Aziraphale rises from the bed, early. In the dim grey of the not yet morning, he finds his clothes strewn about the floor, gathers them up, smiling softly as he remembers.

And here, he tossed my coat like he’d been waiting for 6,000 years. Here he nearly tore the buttons off of my waistcoat. Here he had to miracle my bow tie undone, his fingers shaking and clumsy with the way that we wanted each other. Aziraphale smiles again. How we want each other. He wanders to the window, peeks through the curtains, sighs. He sees the glow where the sun will soon rise and begins a well practiced ritual. He gathers his garments, pulling them on methodically. He buttons, clasps, zips. He closes the cufflinks at the sleeves of his shirt, ties the bowtie firmly at his collar. He is reaching for his waistcoat, and his overcoat, his back turned for a moment on his sleeping lover. Lover. Aziraphale savors the thought. We love each other, he thinks, smiling. Pausing as he dresses, Aziraphale sits down on the side of the bed and strokes Crowley's cheek. His hair is longer this morning than it had been when they’d gone to bed, and Aziraphale brushes it gently out of his sleeping face. He turns for his waistcoat, all too aware of the light beginning to creep through the bedroom window.

Aziraphale knew how humans whispered to each other - don’t let the sun go down on you there, they’d say of an unfamiliar town, it’s dangerous. You never know what might happen. But it went the other way, too. For him. Be careful where you are when the sun rises. Be careful what someone else might see.

Aziraphale knows that Crowley sees most of what he tries to hide - it is a feeling he is still unused to - and though he is not fearful anymore, he is still relaxing into the intimacy of it. Vulnerability with the world, on the other hand. With the sun rising into the morning, shining onto all the parts of his soul, onto his deep love, spread on the soft sheets. That scared Aziraphale. For all that he was in love, he was exposed, and so he dressed.

Fully dressed, he turns away from the window (south-facing. He knows by the stars). Book in hand, he sits where he had been laying, leaning against the headboard, looking down on the sleeping face of his lover. He strokes Crowley’s face, hand coming to rest on the nape of his neck. Slowly Crowley wakes, reaching for Aziraphale as he would if the angel were still asleep. He rolls over, pressing his face into Aziraphale’s hip, reaching a hand for his. Crowley looks up at him, with those golden eyes, his angel dressed down to his good socks. 

“Old habit?” asked Crowley, no bite to the words. For a moment, Aziraphale feels as though he ought to lie. For a moment, he did not want to have to remember the ways he’d been doing this for millenia. At night, well. Anything goes. But best close your soul back up by morning. Aziraphale had always had things to lose, and he had often been a coward. It was like this: Aziraphale was deeply in love. And oh, how he needed to know that that love was protected. And oh, how easy it was to protect the things you love by hiding them.

Aziraphale shifted on the bed, letting Crowley’s question hang in the air. The demon in bed with you, he thought to himself, deserves the world. If you cannot give him that, give him an honest man.

“Yes,” Aziraphale replied, after a moment.  
“I know” Crowley said, opening his eyes to look up at the angel. “I know it is”

Crowley shifts in the bed, pressing his head against the angel’s leg, draping an arm around his waist. He is gentle. Aziraphale has stayed, and he knows Aziraphale wants to stay. Aziraphale, who’d bit his lip at the bedroom door, then opened his mouth to whisper the most lovely, intoxicating things. Aziraphale, who had asked him May I?, and Is this alright? and held him throughout, and then afterwards too. Aziraphale, who hid and hid, and was a coward sometimes, and was still learning how to blossom out of a life wretched with fear of the ethereal. He is sitting up straight on the bed, in three layers of clothing, but he stayed. And Crowley, cuddled up to his side, letting his lover read and stroke his red hair, is gentle with him.

\-----

The second time, Aziraphale sleeps. Crowley is warm, with his soft skin and strong arms and Aziraphale sleeps. He wakes before the sun rises, pressed into the shoulder of his lover. He is wearing only sweat, and his lover’s spit, and it is almost enough.

When Crowley wakes, Aziraphale is soft beside him. His skin presses into Aziraphale’s evening sweater, his trousers with an elastic band that he’d miracled up. 

There had been others, before Crowley. Always they had awoken not to the warm body of a lover, but to tea. Chocolates. A perfumed note, saying something kind and empty in beautiful script.

Always Aziraphale would steal in the cold morning, filing the sweet memory away under his tongue, in his chest, close to his heart. He would look up to the sky, every time, finding each constellation he could see, and finally due north. Here, he’d think to himself, is something I can have. Something I can know that will never change, that no one can ever take away. The sun would rise, and the bite of the cold air would strip the warmth from him, leaving nothing on his skin but that ceaseless armor, the world kept out.

The world was not built for Aziraphale. He had lifetimes of looking in on the lives of others, looking back over his shoulder, looking warily at the future. It is hard to blame him for wanting to steal a moment of light, of skin, of coming undone and bare boned, even if he couldn’t really. Even if, as the years passed, and he had to bite his lip so as not to shout a different name. 

He is afraid, still. He’s so afraid his love will be attacked or hurt our found out. He is beginning to untangle his identity from Heaven (it is slow going). He is still fighting his need to hide and covet his heretical love, to smother it and push it away.

The place Crowley touches in his soul is so raw from years of want. It holds an old wound. And he needs Crowley to be there with him and hold his hand as he opens it up. Aziraphale has to be so brave, to bare his soul and let Crowley settle into it like a puzzle piece. It feels like something difficult and terrifying and perfect. There are some nights Aziraphale fears he will tremble apart before he will be able to surrender to love. Yet in his heart of hearts, he knows it is what God designed him to need. And so he takes his fear head on, and he fights. And slowly, he heals.

Aziraphale knows that Crowley understands. Knows he remembers long, long ago being an angel. He understands how hard it is for Aziraphale to let himself be in love. How brave Aziraphale has to be. And Aziraphale knows Crowley is bitter about the ways his angel has been harmed by those who were supposed to cherish him (and oh, how Crowley cherishes him). And he knows Crowley loves all the fiercer for it, and treasures each undone button, each soft sigh and kiss in the kitchen, by the door, on the stairs as they climb to bed together. At first, Aziraphale questions it. How can he care for me so deeply, he wonders, despairing. But he is realizing how much he must detangle Heaven’s cold indifference from what he believes to be love. Slowley, he is learning.

\-----

Since the beginning, Aziraphale has loved the stars. Though his long life, he could usually see them anytime he likes, but after electric lighting that changes. In London nowadays he could barely make them out. It had been Crowley who had suggested they moved out to the country, the South Downs, and even then he didn’t really see them until a hazy summer night, the two out walking late together. They’d stopped to perch on a low garden wall stones still sun-warm. Crowley craned his head back, leaning on the wall for support, as the first stars of the evening came twinkling into view. Aziraphale wasn’t looking at the sky. There was a gentle breeze off the coast, and he watched as it caught a Crowley's flyaway hair where it had slipped from the bun it was in. He’d been growing it out since the armagedont. As Aziraphale reached to tuck it back behind his ear, Crowley pointed to the sky.

“Do you see that, angel? That star, there?” Aziraphale leaned on Crowely’s shoulder and craned his neck to look. Crowley was pointing up to a bright white star, almost directly about them.

‘Did you know”, Crowley began, and then stopped. He continued more quietly. “Did you know I helped build that one, angel?” Aziraphale looked at him. His gaze was fixed upwards, unmoving. Aziraphale watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, lost in memory. Aziraphale put a hand on his shoulder.

“Did you, dear boy?” He began, carefully. Crowley was still learning how to talk about before the fall. Aziraphale looked back up. “It’s beautiful, my love. Simply stunning,” he said with a smile. As Crowley shifted positions on the low wall, leaning so he could still watch the sky with his back against Aziraphale’s chest, he continued. “Why, the craftsmanship is simply wonderful. I’d always wondered about the stars. How they came to be so lovely.” Aziraphale ran his fingers through Crowley’s red hair. “Do you have any others? Up there?” Crowley was silent for a beat.

“A few,” he said. Then he pointed. “There. East, from here. Do you see? It’s faint. But it’s special.” Crowley almost smiled. “That one’s not white. That one’s actually blue.” Aziraphale turned his head and could just make it out, sitting there on the horizon, a twinkling blue star. “Oh Crowley,” he whispered. “It’s stunning, my dear. Simply magnificent.” He held Crowley to his chest as they watched the stars. It was properly dark when they shifted, rose from the wall to stroll home under the night sky, arm in arm.

Aziraphale looks back on that memory often. Lying awake in their bed, he often turned his gaze to the stars wheeling in the sky outside the window. Crowley helped make those, he’d think to himself. And as he’d get up in the early mornings to dress, sometimes in a clean undershirt, sometimes in boxers and a sweater, he’d think about that night under the sky, sitting on the garden wall. He didn’t have to tell me those things, Aziraphale would think. He did that to be close to me. To give me a part of himself he is still uncomfortable with. Because he wants me, and he’s going to stay with me. Because he’s not afraid.

It is a long time before Aziraphale decides: he does not want to be afraid anymore. It is a wedge that he lets be driven between himself and the one he loves. And he’s done with it. 

It is springtime. Aziraphale knows because of the way the birds sound when he makes tea in the morning, and from the ridiculous Queen calendar that Crowley’s put up in their kitchen. It is the time of the morning where the sun has just started to rise, not yet visible over the rolling fields but lighting up the sky in a delicate preamble. Aziraphale wakes up slowly, pressed into Crowley’s side where he’d collapsed the night before, panting and gasping and holding and loving. He can hear Crowley’s gentle snores and see, thought the window, the last of the stars fade into the daytime sky.

He takes a deep, steadying breath. Deliberately, he shuts his eyes, pulls the sheet to his shoulders, and reaches around Crowley to pull him close. Slowly, the sun tiptoes its way up to kiss the horizon. Light is coming through the gap in the curtains in ernest, now, and with a sleepy yawn, Crowley opens his eyes. He turns slowly, rolls to face his lover. Before he is fully awake, he knows. 

“Did I wake you?” he asked.

“No, actually. I’ve been awake for awhile. Watching the stars”

Aziraphale takes Crowley’s hand under the covers and wraps it with his own. Crowley moves his free hand to stroke his lover’s face.

“Alright?” he whispers. He pays attention. This is difficult, he knows.

Outside, the birds begin to sing in earnest.

“Yes,” Aziraphale says softly. “Yes, I’m alright. I’m-” His voice breaks and he draws in a deep, shuddering breath. Crowley waits.   
“I’m wonderful, actually” Aziraphale whispers. “Crowley - Crowley, thank you. For everything. And the stars. Crowley, thank you for the stars.”


End file.
